|
k |
kkkkkkkkkkkk |
k |
|
k k k k k k |
BLACK
HELICOPTERS EPISODE 38 SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 11:09 PM Anne lay back across Andy’s lumpy bed, gazing
upwards towards a ceiling which seemed to be fading out into darkness even
half a dozen candles couldn’t penetrate. Henry lurked somewhere up there,
enjoying his meal. Spiders and... snakes? Rats in
the wall... there was a story the Catfish mentioned once, in his book, by Poe
– but no, that was another. Still, considering the author was Poe, it would probably have ended
badly for all involved. Or maybe it had been an episode of the Twilight Zone,
one of the old ones... |
k k k k k k |
That
had been good weed.
Andy removed his shoes, let his toe feel around under the bed until it bumped
up against a thing. A guitar shaped thing with a fist-shaped hole in the back.
He reached down, pulled it up.
"Yukk!" Anne responded. "Did
the burglars smash that too?"
"Actually
no... it was trashed long ago. Otherwise, it would
have been gone a long time ago. Thing is... looks like shit, but
it plays. Sort of..." and he strummed a few chords of dubious provenance.
He leaned back against the wall, hoisting his feet up to make an X across
Anne's body.
"Remember
our anarchists' song, from the U.?" he said before affecting a nasal
Brooklyn accent...
|
|
"Oh... I'm da
sorta guy, what likes to roam around I organize da
people, help to tear the system down And when I find a boss, that scum which
pulls the people’s strings I cut 'em and I blow 'em up, an' other
ugly things They call me the Wobbily!
Yeah, I'm da Wobbully... I roam from town to town to town to town... ... dah dah, de dah,
de dah... Anyway," he shrugged
as Anne wriggled sideways, hung both hands around him and kissed the side of
his neck. "Hey!" he exclaimed as she kicked a shoe to the floor,
revealing naked nylon. "Pheww!" he recoiled.
"Whatsamatta you... career women ain't supposed to have smelly feet..." "I can't help it!" Anne said,
lying back on the cluttered bed, pushing more papers over its edge. "I wear
my soles out all day chasing stupid men; this is the thanks I get? Foot shaming?"
“Maybe.” He picked up the guitar and resumed... That's right,
I'll roam from town to town... Until the Revolution comes... dah dah, de dah... And I'm as happy as a clown... For all the power that comes spurting... from the barrel of
my gun... oh... I'm the kinda guy..." |
“Spurting?”
Anne recoiled...
Abruptly
he let the guitar slip down, off the bed. "Although your Catfish says that
anarchists are all right-wing, now, like that Ayn Rand
Paul who got beat up by his lawnmower man or those somebodies
Spanish. Capitol
rioters.
"You've
got to stop being a fashion victim," he counseled.
"Naah... I'm way, way down on the ladder of the hierarchy of
victimization. Costa Ricans, unwed mothers harassed by pizza guys, corona
people with environmental illnesses. Smelly, sore feet are small potatoes.
Easily satisfied by a visit to the spa," she added, raising her left hand
a few inches to stroke his back.
"Easily?" Andy reached across, drew little circles
over the nearest breast with his index finger. "Looks to me like you're
trying to climb up that ladder to the twenty-five percent bracket..."
"Meaning
being with you's worse than hangin’
with Glenn at the Ivona? Cut the crap, kiddo," she
said, punching him lightly on the shoulder.
"No,
it's true. Really! Fact is, I'm really crazy! I just
don't care... all these years of Nixonism, Reaganism, Clintonism times two, Bushshish times three, Omawahabishm,
Trumpism, Bidenism... shischismism... just blowin’ my
mind. Spinning down that helter-skelter, through the black Cobb-hole to the
dark neoliberal circle of despair... all we are saying…"
And he strummed
another sour chord… “is get piece of ass…”
"You
should quit the Sanctuary, get back into music," Anne suggested, rumpling
his hair. "Start one of those gothic metal emo-rap
bands, sing angry, pitiful songs about suicide,
spiders... now that all those other old grunge guys who’d be your competition
are hanging themselves. Or pimping
prostitute supplements and funeral insurance…"
"It
would be a choice. Probably no worse than the choices American
kids face today... go off to school, pick up a gun. Shoot yourself, waste the
teacher, classmates... or just go shooting into a crowd. Or drop out, join the Army and go shoot Costa
Ricans…"
Anne
lifted her hand off his head, let it roam further south. "Boys!... boys and their guns..."
"I
mean..." Andy started, "...isn't this adultery, or something like
it?"
"We've
been over for years," Anne sighed. "The way I look at it..."
"You and me? Or you and Glenn? How
about
Glenn, how does he look at it? After all, he was always the sort of gun nut behind
his Clark Kent glasses…"
"You never pulled out of the sixties,
even though you were in diapers during the Summer of Love! Glenn got past all
that, but never survived the eighties and the nineties, and it wasn’t just
watching that Abba movie five times and dragging me to that goddam
Broadway production in his Toyota with a fuckin’ Kerry
sticker. Twice! Wants it all! Anything he can grab on the side
and then some Stepford doll to crawl home to... I
mean, if we had a home? Sublet the condo
in Maryland... the Air B&B people are scammers... this last year we've been living out of
hotels. Mostly good hotels, resorts even, but it's blow
into town... shmooze people into joining or at least
thinking about supporting the Coalition, take their money and move on, dot con..."
"Doesn't
sound like the forty-dollar door-to-door trip," Andy said.
"No
it's serious. Deadly serious!" she repeated, letting her wrist bounce on
Andy's groin like a zombie bouncing atop a trampoline. “Jack gets the big money from the money people
convinced he’ll take votes away from Democrats. Just like Tillerman,
working Bernie Sanders’ lists…”
“Russians?”
“My
lips are sealed,” Anne zipped an index finger across her mouth.
"You
really are the people I've fantasized about shooting," Andy slipped into
the first person. "All these thoughts that flicker through my head at
night between the screams and sirens on the street... bodies running, flying,
I'm just turning around and pointing... there! There! like
some heroine in that bloody pirate movie sequel Disney and Rob Zombie are
collaborating on now that the actors’ strike is over, the musical out of Brecht
and Weill, now that the Mouse is running Fox and the Guv’nor’s
running the Mouse out of Florida. Doing
the peoples' duty... nothing left beautiful or healthy whatsoever anymore, so
why the hell not do a Virginia Tech, Uvalde, Orlando or - what was that place
with the Jews, Pittsburgh? I feel! I understand the fascists
now... we romanticize victims, thinking they're better than us when we really
know that all real victims want out of life's a chance to turn the tables. Like
the Kosovars, or Paltestinians,
the shite Iraqis... that Zanzibar whoever, executing
all the old Saddam, Qaddafi and Bashir and the tunnel
people in Jerusalem... sad people..."
"That..."
Anne said, nose upturned, beginning to unbutton her silk blouse, "is about
the strangest pickup rap I've ever had dumped on me! At least in this century…"
"What
can I say?" Andy shrugged. "It's like the Bible tells you so... these
are the times to refrain from embracing. Deut. twenty seventeen. Or maybe it was Don Jones. Of course it doesn't help that abortion is now
illegal, or that the central metaphor for private life over the past generation
has become disease... AIDS, corona, wokeness…"
Anne
lifted her hand, raised it, slapped him sharply across
the cheek. "Well, fuck the Bible! How about Burger Jack... or back when it
was just Burger King before somebody overthrew that creepy King... sometimes
you gotta break the rules! It was Burger
King, wasn't it... or was it somebody's sneakers squeaking? And sneaking... I
mean, speaking about squeakers, maybe I should be asking if you've got any
rubbers around here?"
Andy
lurched to his left, straddled her. "Good show, jolly good show!" he
said, affecting a British accent. "Excellent question...
even consummate! Striving to extrapolate the consequences..."
"Andy,
lose the voice!"
"Huh?"
"The voices!" Anne protested, "I always hated
it when you would use these phony voices. Be yourself!"
"Milady,
I..."
"Glenn always uses voices too, he thinks
I liked that about you, so he’s still imitatin’.
Except that it's OK with him... he doesn't have any self left to
lose..."
"Maybe
while we are on the topic of consummation and prophylactics... new or used... I
ought to be asking you about
Glenn," Andy said, the British voice spinning up and away like a bug
towards Henry's web.
"We
do great work together. The rest, not so much. His only infection is power."
Andy
grunted, sat up to unzip his fly. "So late in life, then, we resort to
unsafe sex..."
"There
is no such thing as safe sex," Anne retorted, sharply. "Western
civilization would collapse without its sexual inhibitions... outright
prohibition or sublimation through commodities, Jack says. If there was decent
American sex, we wouldn't have any art or culture, no economic progress. No iPhone Thirteens. Crime,
and the proximity of death - these stimulate creativity."
Andy
looked over his shoulder. "Why do I get the feeling that you're slumming?"
"Because this is a slum? Because you're so
obsessed with running yourself down in the service of some imaginary virtue...
of romanticizing poverty and powerlessness?"
"Glenn
was always the one who romanticized victims," Andy protested. "I,
frankly, despise them. Nothing but bums... bums! Everybody who actually deals with
their situation does, too. It's easy to love the poor... at a distance." Andy
found himself staring at a sock he'd removed, twirling it between his fingers
and pondering. "And the caring communities, the charity bums on salary to
pacify the surplus with soup kitchens and maybe a cot in a warehouse when the
temperatures fall below freezing? So
they won’t pick up their guns and agitate for real change. Parasites! Like four years ago, when Glenn was here and
asked me to find him a homeless man for some PR stunt; white guy, middle-aged
but not a bum, or at least someone who could be cleaned up and passed off as a
downsized middle manager cut loose during the plague. I remember the whole
spin; that was just after the Catfish got kicked out of Congress..."
"He
retired," Anne objected. “They jiggered his district…”
"That’s
racist. Whatever... Glenn wanted to get him this laid-off factory guy, no women, they would have implied family desertion, which plays
into the hands of Republicans or the Democrats, depending on how you spin it.
Middle aged homeless white guy, Trump voter, preferably with a family... you
weren't here," Andy added, "I think he said that you were out in
California."
"Good!
At least I did something right."
"Boy,
did Glenn look shitfaced when the guy I found for him said he wanted to get paid
for being in all those photos and videos. As if it wasn't enough to just be
working for the good of God, the Catfish and America... Glenn might be a Conk
but he's really social Darwinism to the bone. Poor people exist to serve him!
Your social service types to entertain and distract the unwanted, charity to
keep them from starving and embarrassing us in front of the Unapissers..."
"Bread
and circuses," Anne pointed out, literally pointing out her point with a
finger on his chin, "wouldn't have been worth diddly
without the Roman Legions and their swords keeping the masses in line..."
"But
they do shield the system from accountability," Andy began to protest when
Anne squirmed, arching her back and reaching beneath the bedspread to extract
an uncomfortable swath of anti-Conk propaganda that Andy had collected over the
past month. Fliers from the PLO, IRA and a dozen other been-around-forever
initials and the new, obscure movements with their slogans, forms and formal
letters from Disson’s office, bills...all of which,
with Andy's professorial jacket, were shoved over the edge of the bed, sliding
onto the threadbare carpet while Anne pressed her lips to his ear and
whispered, harshly...
"Are
we gonna talk politics or fuck?"
And
finally he couldn't help but smile. "If you're positive that I'm not being
a homewrecker," he said, beginning to fumble
with his shirt.
"What
home?" Anne interrupted. "At worst, a hotelwrecker. And let me... I'll be careful," she
slapped his hand away. "It doesn't impress me, men ripping off their
shirts. Glenn's done it too many times. You, on the other hand, can't afford to
be having shirts ripped off... trust me! I'll be careful, that's a very nice
shirt. The kind of white shirt that white people used to wear
to go down South with, in, and get shot in. No homes to wreck. Glenn has to replicate the
people he sees on television or in magazine ads..."
"He
could be in a men's clothing ad, he's in better shape than I
am," Andy suggested, even as he loosened Anne's belt and began sliding her
Chanel skirt downwards. "Works out? And his hair's never out of place!
It's even better than the hair on the men, here, who read the news on
television..."
"Yeah,
but he wouldn't make it on TV... too twitchy. He needs to see a doctor, take
the right sort of pills, but he won't... instead he takes other, wrong, pills
and drinks. And plays with his gun, everywhere... that's what he says… my
glass, my gal, my gun. His Henry!" she added, wincing as Andy's teeth
closed firmly around one nipple.
He ran tongue
down her breastalopes... through one valley and back
up the other. "Here the brigadistas come," he
whispered, "marching cross the hills of Costa Rica, down to San Jose!"
Her arms flailed briefly, then plunged downwards, raking
his bare back while he pulled his pants down, kicked them off, raising his
voice as he twisted atop her. "Resolutely the Red Army drives towards the
caves of Yunnan..."
He
grasped both her hips... she reached for his hair, then let it go, shaking the
loose strands that had come out over the side of the bed, gripping his buttocks
instead. "More!" she cried...
"In
a Parisian street, the people's battering-ram explodes against the gates of the
Bastille..."
"More!"
"In
the Costa Rican rainforest, Comandante Cuatro's massive anaconda squeezes through the tentflaps of imperialist headquarters..."
She bit
his lip, but gently, he thrust left, then right, then left again. Their
coupling concluded in the instant that it takes for a political commercial to
flash onscreen... one of those hit pieces that proliferate during the witching
season between Halloween and Election Day when all argument and posture have
been boiled down to symbolism… waving flags, marching soldiers, screeching
clergymen. Still, her contractions kept
wringing every last drop of moisture out of his body... as if he were an orange
in a juicer... convulsions that broke his patter down to a series of incoherent
grunts, continuing even after he had offered up all that he had to give. The
mocking refrain of that old "Hot Rod Lincoln" rattled through his
brain... "all there is, and there ain't no
more..." still she rocked, heaved and thrust, finally throwing the weight
of her body sideways to twist Andy over, pin him on his back so he was left to
look up into the dark, flickering domain of candleglow
and spiders, wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into, even as he heard
the 'whup whup whup!' of another UNAPIS helicopter somewhere over the
street, between Anne's gasps, the old voices skittering through his thoughts
like rats in the hotel walls that kept assuring him that it didn't matter...
Nothing
mattered...
Nothing.
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 11:17 PM
"Motherfuckers!"
Glenn
Savitt spat this out in the near-empty Satellite
Lounge, three doors down from the Ivona. His
audience, a weary Massachusetts Conk trying to close their deal on the Ethics
Caucus, winced and stared down into the swirling tremors of his scotch and ice,
recalling the old subliminal seduction hysteria... monsters airbrushed into
booze ads to torment vulnerable alcoholics into ordering another drink. Now, he
was a distressed, defeated and... of course... older
babysitter to semi-important madmen, measuring the longevity of his plight as a
lobster might contemplate the rising temperature of the pot he'd been summarily
dropped into.
"Whole
fuckin' Convention's laughing at us!" Glenn
snarled. "An’ my woman? She's out dancin' with all of ‘em... Colorado cowboys, all lined up
to take a poke at her? You know the Davis Mansion, where they're whooping it
up... I picketed that place once, when Casper, the friendly
ghost; Weinstein or what-the-fuck Reagan’s man came into town! Used to live
here, you know?"
"He
did? Good ol’ Cap? Really?" the Conk pretended interest,
surreptitiously checking his watch.
"Not
Casper," Glenn spat, "me! People from here know how to keep their
bitches in line, how to settle problems," Glenn said, with an ominous
determination. "Lemme tell you about this guy
here, used to be the local big-shot, name of Mark Cobb..."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk |
k |
|||
RETURN to "BLACK HELICOPTERS" directory
VIEW CURRENT COLUMN by JACK "CATFISH" PARNELL... "ENTROPY and RENAISSANCE"
Have a
glance at the current episode of our occult serial, wherein a young American encounters
bizarre foreign artists and occultists – from Aleister
Crowley and William Yeats to Alfred Jarry and a young,
very feral Adolph Schicklgruber…
Follow the mob of desperate
football fanatics who, after the FCC approves moving the Superbowl
to a premium channel accessible only by a scarce and expensive black box, storm
their local electronics outlets to fight for their right to spectate,
in…
And delve into the
story of the last successful Native American revolt in the jungles of southeastern
Mexico where an implacable tribe of rebels ousted an imperial army under the
command of their mad General in…
“THE INSURGENCE of CHAN SANTA CRUZ”